Hackathon Tips for Developers and Evangelists

Hackathon Tips for Developers and Evangelists

SendGrid’s team of evangelists attends a lot of hackathons, in addition to other events. In turn, they’ve written a lot about hackathons, from both the perspective of a developer hacking and an evangelist working the event. Below, you’ll find some of the best tips they’ve shared recently.

Remember the Community

Hackathons mean a lot of things to different people. The important thing to remember is that a hackathon happens for the community that attends. Oftentimes it’s organized by that very community it supports.

Organizers, Price Sponsorships Appropriately

Along with bigger events comes higher costs. The price of these giant showcases are footed by the sponsors, but not all of these companies have immensely deep pockets. That becomes a problem if the hands-on sponsors start to look elsewhere.

Show Your Best Self

To succeed at a hackathon requires an excellent demo of a product that is as finished as possible. These posts help you think about putting real effort into the communication of what you’ve built, as well as some ideas for making your hack demo-ready with the minimum effort.

Even if you aren’t at a hackathon, there are opportunities all around you to work with other developers. In an earlier post the developer relations team shared their tips to embrace your developer community.

Adam DuVander speaks fluent "developer" while serving as Developer Communications Director. He helps SendGrid connect to coders of all stripes. Previously Adam wrote for Wired, Webmonkey and edited ProgrammableWeb, the leading resource for APIs.